Copyright & Art:
Issues that Matter to Creators and Users

A little bit of background about this site: why copyright, why art? The reasons are many and deep.

I started this site in 1996 as a place for my students to access readings and online content about copyright for a course on Visual Resources Management, which I taught at the University of Oregon. This was an experimental course at the UO based on my long involvement with similar content offered as workshops from 1983 to 1997, which I taught with my colleague Nancy Schuller at the University of Texas at Austin and before that with Nancy DeLaurier at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Copyright was one of the topics covered in the workshops and later in my course because it was and still is a vital facet in knowing how to manage and use visual resources, especially when they represented art, architecture, and visual culture as slides, photographs, and digital images. Copyright and the arts has also been a personal focus and interest because I am trained as an art historian (as a user of copyrighted works and a creator of new context for them). I also apply my art historical training as an editor of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation (as a manager of others' copyrights). And I am a jewelry artist—clsjewelry.com (a creator and owner of copyrights). I have also had the good fortune to be part of several important copyright initiatives: representing the College Art Association (CAA) during the CONFU deliberations, being part of a roundtable discussion again representing CAA during the "orphan works" hearings, and more recently being part of the development of the Visual Resources Association's Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study.

I have always believed that education is at the root of our understanding of copyright: what we know can inform us about what we do. This website aims to educate readers who have questions and who have yet to find reasonable answers. For some questions, answers are anything but settled. I invite you to explore this site and to become engaged in our quest for answers.

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, by Peter Hirtle -- "begun as an expanded version of Lolly Gasaway's copyright chart, but with the primary focus on unpublished works. In this new version, the section on unpublished works has been updated to reflect copyright status as of 1 January 2004. A new section on the U.S. copyright status of works published outside of the U.S. has also been added. In order to facilitate printing, a PDF version of the file is available as well, and several new alternative copyright charts are listed in footnote 1."

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law? by Keith Aoki (1955-2011), James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins -- a comic book written by Boyle and Jenkins and illlustrated by Aoki, a talented cartoonist, musician, arts advocate, humanist, professor (and mentor), and expert in intellectual property, civil rights, critical race theory, local government law, globalization, and critical theory. A publication under a Creative Commons License of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law, this graphic novel presents copyright law with a comic twist - perhaps the kindest way for most of us to penetrate its complexities and quirks.

Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School "is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture. Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school's wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions."

Bridgeman v. Corel

The Bridgeman Art Library, LTD, Plaintiff, v. Corel Corporation, et ano., Defendants, United States District Court, Southern District, New York (25 F.Supp.2d 421), November 13, 1998 original decision. The decision ruled that exact photographic copies of two-dimensional public domain artwork lacks originality and cannot be protected by copyright in the United States.

Who Owns this Image? Art, Access and the Public Domain after Bridgeman v. Corel, reported by Gretchen A. Wagner, General Counsel of ARTstor: "On April 29th, (2008) the College Art Association, the New York City Bar Association Art Law
Committee, ARTstor, Creative Commons, and Art Resource co-sponsored an event entitled "Who
Owns this Image? Art, Access and the Public Domain after Bridgeman v. Corel." The event
included an afternoon symposium, with about 40 participants, and an evening panel session, with
about 400 people in attendance." Read the report at http://www.artstor.org/news/n-pdf/who-owns-image.pdf and Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log "Bridgeman v. Corel, 9 years on" (April 30, 2008) at http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2008/04/bridgeman-v-corel-9-years-on.html

Guidelines for Educational Uses of Music, April 1976 (developed and approved by the Music Publishers' Association of the United States, Inc., the National Music Publishers' Association, Inc., the Music Teachers National Association, the Music Educators National Conference, the National Association of Schools of Music, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Copyright Law Revision)

Principles for Licensing Electronic Resources, July 15, 1997 (Association of Research Libraries, with American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, Medical Library Association, and Special Libraries Association)

Copyright Policy of Carnegie Mellon University, originally issued to campus on February 22, 1995, as a presidential policy memo. "This policy presents Carnegie Mellon University's criteria for legitimate copying of copyrighted materials by university faculty and staff within the purview of the Copyright Act."

COPYRIGHT SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A.

Copyright Kids, a site designed to address copyright questions and issues affecting today's children: "an educational resource on copyright issues for teachers and parents of 5th - 8th graders who are engaged in a creative process."

Visual Artists and Galleries Association, Inc. (VAGA), 111 Broadway - Suite 1006, New York, NY 10006. The telephone number is 212/736-6666; fax number is 212/736-6767; Robert Panzer is the Executive Director. E-mail: info@vagarights.com

Miscellaneous

Books and Articles

The Fair Use/Fair Dealing Handbook, by Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi. policybandwidth, April 2013. "This handbook contains the fair use and fair dealing statutes .... The handbook does not include the many implementations of the exceptions for quotations and illustration in Article 10 of the Berne Convention, which refers to 'fair practice.' Fair practice under Article 10 is a distinct concept from fair use or fair dealing. The handbook also does not include the myriad specific exceptions countries have enacted in addition to fair use or fair dealing. Finally, the handbook does not contain exceptions that appear to be inspired at least in part by fair use or fair dealing, but do not employ those terms."

"Moral Rights for Artists: The Visual Arts Rights Act," by Jeffrey P. Cunard, published in CAA News, Volume 27, Number 3 (May/June 2002), p. 6-8. An excellent overview of the legislation and how it applies or doesn't to artforms that fall outside traditional boundaries, for example, mixed-media and multimedia. A must-read!

A Guide to Copyright for Museums and Galleries, by Peter Wienand, Anna Booy, and Robin Fry (New York & London: Routledge, 2000). Especially useful for the UK perspective. A collaborative project supported by The Scottish Museums Council, the Museums Copyright Group, and the Museum and Galleries Commission

Who Owns Pooh?, by Laura Bradford, in Time Magazine, Vol. 160, no. 3. Court battles over 'digital rights' conclude that each new use of copyrightable materials requires a new contract -- a benefit to artists and a headache to publishers.

Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property, held by the American Assembly of Columbia University on February 7-10, 2002 [final report of the symposium, available as a pdf file; the site also includes streaming video clips of some of the presentations]

Note to readers: Over time, a number of urls cited on this page have been changed, removed, or lost. I have tried to find the original materials mentioned in the link, often resorting to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.